Talking to your end users

​​​Talking to your end users

For the end users from the higher education and research communities NRENs are fairly invisible partners. The local ICT departments provide the ICT services for the organisations and lean on the NREN for their internet and any additional services provision.

A sound
business model - the key ingredient to the success of an NREN - depends on offering demand-led value-added services; it is therefore essential for NRENs to know the actual needs of the end users to be able to align their service portfolio and be relevant to their end users.

We hope the resources outlined below
will help you identify 'selling features' of R&E networking and formulate compelling arguments when making the case towards your own network users.

User case studies

User case studies demonstrate how R&E networks benefit a specific user community. Such case studies not only describe in detail how specific user needs are met by advanced R&E connectivity, but also provide third-party back-up (from the actual end users) of the benefits themselves. The below list links off to case study material developed to showcase the positive end-user impact of national and regional R&E networks:

Additional end user related documents

This section also contains
reports and studies which provide additional insight into the value add of NRENs from a user perspective. The focus of the selected documents below is primarily (but not exclusively) on user groups within the research and higher education communities.